How To Create Affinity Diagrams for Presentations
Affinity Diagrams are a great productivity tool that you can use either for business or educational purposes to help organizing large amounts of data into their natural relationships and help people to take decisions. There are plenty of ways to create affinity diagrams for presentations. You can create affinity diagrams by inserting sticky notes using PowerPoint shapes into the slide or prepare the affinity diagram using 3rd party tools and then exporting the outcome as a picture or vector before it can be inserted into the slides.
The advantage of using a 3rd. party tool is that you can keep the original file document for future editing inside a software that is prepared for this purpose, while the image to be inserted into the slide reflect the latest version of the diagram. However, maintaining the presentation and affinity diagram synced can add a new level of complexity, so in that case it would worth to evaluate the other alternative of creating the diagram from inside Microsoft PowerPoint.
StickySorterSetup
You can use StickySorterSetup to facilitate brainstorming and organize information visually. It let you create simple screen notes and organize them into themes. Then you can keep track of all kinds of questions or problems. It is especially useful for students as a collaboration tool to identify common themes in their research but can also be used to represent an Affinity Diagram for your PowerPoint presentations.
The website from OfficeLabs was not working at the time we reviewed this tool, however you can download the software directly from Microsoft website following this link.
Scrivener
Scrivener is a content generation tool that has support to organize your ideas by using Sticky Notes. It has a version for Mac and Windows. This tool was created for writers but easily you can use it to make Affinity Diagrams. It can be used to compose and structure long and difficult documents. Go to Scrivener.
SuperNotecard
SuperNotecard (Mindola Software) is another alternative to make affinity diagrams that later can be exported to PowerPoint slides. It was also created to help writers organize and structure large amounts of data. Go to SuperNotecard.
Other alternatives to create affinity diagrams in PowerPoint
You can create an affinity diagram by adding new shapes into the slide using PowerPoint. The real benefit of using this approach is that you can easily keep control of your ideas and shapes used to model the affinity diagram in the same presentation tool that you will use to present, Microsoft PowerPoint. The drawback is that originally PowerPoint was not intended to be used as a tool to organize large amounts of data so depending on the amount of data you have you may find it requires a lot of time to keep everything organized.
As an alternative, you can use ready-made PowerPoint templates with affinity diagrams. For example, Microsoft Templates gallery offers a free Affinity Diagram PowerPoint Template that you can download directly from this URL.
You can use this affinity diagram PowerPoint template to gather large numbers of brainstorming ideas and put them into logical groups. The affinity diagram template shows a sample affinity diagram and helps to categorize ideas in response to problem that needs to be addressed.